Mr. Latimer: Your “Letter: the Circular File” brought back my encounter with government busy-bodies when I worked in manufacturing. I would get this multi-page survey form every quarter that went through sales, inventory, cost of goods sold …..yada…yada. It was enormously disruptive to my work load. It had all the penalty information on the envelope, and I was afraid not to fill it out due to any consequences to my employer. If you didn’t get it to them on time, the threats would start via mail and then go on to phone calls.
The last straw was when I got a phone call from them because “they did not like my numbers”. I told them that the numbers were the numbers. In the end, I agreed to look at them again, and I just never did. That nightmare finally ended, and perhaps they found another entity with figures they liked better. – J.G.
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HJL,
Regarding the census. The same thing happened to me. A woman contacted me regarding some kind of census, leaving cards on my gate and a phone call claiming she wouldn’t stop coming back until she got the information. She finally caught me leaving and sort of blocked my exit. I told her I only had a minute since I was going to work. I refused to answer quite a few questions. It felt like an invasion of privacy. She had an official card and a phone number of her supervisor, but I never called to check her out. I gave short, evasive answers, and she finally left. Here lately, sometimes when I am awake in the night, my hotspot that connects me to the Internet makes the noise it makes when it connects, and I am not on my computer or have not turned it on myself. I have since been taking the battery out when I am not using it. Makes you wonder. Like Sigmund Freud said, “The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.” Keep up the good work that you do. Thanks, – FAH
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Also, B.W. sent in this letter for SurvivalBlog Readers:
To Whom It May Concern,
Pursuant to Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, the only information you are empowered to request is the total number of occupants at this address. My “name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, telephone number, relationship, and housing tenure” have absolutely nothing to do with apportioning direct taxes or determining the number of representatives in the House of Representatives. Therefore, neither Congress nor the Census Bureau have the constitutional authority to make that information request a component of the enumeration outlined in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3. In addition, I cannot be subject to a fine for basing my conduct on the Constitution, because that document trumps laws passed by Congress.
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479 (May 26, 1894)
“Neither branch of the legislative department [House of Representatives or Senate], still less any merely administrative body [such as the Census Bureau], established by congress, possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson, 103 U.S. 168, 190. We said in Boyd v. U.S., 116 U. S. 616, 630, 6 Sup. Ct. 524,?and it cannot be too often repeated,?that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of government and it’s employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by Mr. Justice Field in Re Pacific Ry. Commission, 32 Fed. 241, 250, ‘of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves, not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.’”
Note: This United States Supreme Court case has never been overturned.
Respectfully,
A Citizen of the United States of America